Pre-market trading in US stocks | Nio and Li Auto lead the rise of Chinese concept stocks! Asml's orders plummet, stock prices fall sharply!

U.S. Stock Market News

1. On April 16, 2024, the China-U.S. Financial Working Group held its fourth meeting in Washington, D.C., United States.

Both sides had in-depth, pragmatic, and constructive discussions on implementing important consensus reached by the leaders, as well as on global and China-U.S. macroeconomic situations, balanced growth, and future communication arrangements. The Chinese side expressed concerns about U.S. restrictions on economic and trade measures towards China, and provided further responses on production capacity issues. Both sides agreed to continue communication and exchanges.

1. In the first quarter, ASME's net sales were 5.29 billion euros, lower than the expected 5.47 billion euros. It is expected that the net sales in the second quarter will be between 5.7 billion to 6.2 billion euros, lower than the expected 6.46 billion euros. The first quarter order intake was 3.61 billion euros, lower than the expected 4.63 billion euros. The first quarter profit was 1.22 billion euros. Sales for 2024 are still expected to be close to those of 2023.

2. Tesla's layoffs in China cover multiple departments, with some departments already completing layoffs, and sales personnel being a "hard-hit area." According to an internal Tesla employee who was laid off, the compensation amounts are all "N+3," and the layoff work has been completed.

3. Tesla's Shanghai Megapack Gigafactory is scheduled to start construction in May this year and is expected to achieve mass production in the first quarter of 2025. This is Tesla's first Megapack Gigafactory project outside the United States.

4. XPeng Motors and Volkswagen Group will jointly develop the EEA electronic and electrical architecture for Volkswagen's electric vehicle platform in China.

5. According to the official Weibo account of Li Auto, the launch event for the all-new Li Auto L6 will be held tomorrow night at 8 p.m.

Pre-market Movers

In the U.S. stock market pre-market trading, the three major stock index futures are up, while the fear index is sharply down.

Bitcoin is currently trading at $63,274, slightly up in the past 24 hours; Ethereum is trading at $3,077, with prices remaining stable over the past 24 hours.

Tech stocks, Chinese concept stocks, and cryptocurrency-related stocks are generally up in pre-market trading.

All seven tech giants in the U.S. are up, with Tesla rising over 1% and AMD slightly down.

XPeng Motors leads the gains with a 3.5% increase, Li Auto up nearly 3%, Bilibili up over 2%, Nio up over 1%, JD.com and Pinduoduo up nearly 1%, Alibaba slightly up, NetEase and Baidu slightly down.

Microstrategy is up nearly 3%, Marathon Digital and Coinbase are up nearly 1%.

In terms of individual stocks, ASME once fell more than 5%, with Q1 performance significantly lower and new order intake far below expectations.

Alcoa Corporation is up over 3%.

Vale SA is up by over 2%, with first-quarter iron ore production exceeding market expectations.

Rio Tinto is up by over 3%, with first-quarter Pilbara iron ore production at 77.9 million tons, and shipments at 78 million tons.

United Airlines is up by over 5%, with first-quarter revenue exceeding market expectations

Strategy Review

1. It's hard for chip giants to replicate last year's performance this earnings season

Citigroup released a report stating that the performance and guidance of semiconductor stocks in the first quarter of 2024 will be more subdued, unable to replicate the AI achievements of 2023. Part of the reason is that semiconductor bellwether AMD will not raise its revenue expectations for the AI segment until this summer, and the performance and guidance of analog chip companies will also meet expectations.

2. What does the large-scale rollout of Tesla FSD V12 mean?

The arrival of ChatGPT in autonomous driving is getting closer! With the performance improvement and large-scale rollout of FSD, it is expected to enhance user willingness to pay, thereby bringing substantial revenue and profit growth to Tesla.

3. Powell is not listening to the "big hawk" anymore, how dare the market?

The decline in U.S. stocks so far in April exhibits all the characteristics of a routine consolidation. More often than not, the biggest threat to the stock market is not the Federal Reserve. On the contrary, the lack of fast enough corporate profit growth to justify the high stock valuations may be the bigger risk